NYSE 24/7 Trading, Tom Lee’s BitMine $110M ETH Purchase, and ETH’s institutional push

Transcript

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>> What's up, guys? It's Tuesday. We had a holiday weekend here in the US, and I'm in my Jensen Huang era, as you can see by the jacket. The market is red, in case you hadn't noticed, and we're going to be talking about technology and neo finance today. What else is new? It's Tuesday, January 20th. You may notice I'm solo. Andy's not here because he's surfing and uh Hawaii has some great vibes that he had to attend to. So, I'm going to be running things solo today on the rollup. We've got an incredible lineup. Uh we're going to get into some news and headlines in a bit. Biggest headline today is the market is red. The New York Stock Exchange NASDAQ 100 is

down about 2%. That's a landslide demolished red market for US equities. 2% we eat that for breakfast, lunch, and dinner here in crypto. Unfortunately, crypto is down something more like 10% over the last 24 hours. And so, we've got a reckoning to deal with as well. Privacy coins are shellacked. Monero's down 17%. Zcash down 8%. Bitcoin and ETH. Bitcoin's down about 4%, ETH is down about 7% in the last 24 hours.

There's a couple of things holding up, particularly in the NEOance category. Uh, Canton is doing all right and Sky is doing okay as well, but man, it's a blood bath in there. Uh, so guys, stay safe. Don't get liquidated. You know, we're still in this like choppy crab zone where obviously, you know, we were up 125, dipped all the way back down. Things looked rough. Bitcoin was hovering in the low to mid 80s. ETH, you know, succumbed to that 3K level. We got a good bounce up upwards of 3,300 and 95K on Bitcoin. Looked like we were going to rip to 106 and we're chopping.

Uh we're essentially rangebound around that 90K mark and around the 3K mark for ETH. So we're not out of the woods yet. Uh a lot of people are suspecting that we go quite lower. Um I've seen calls for 65K. I've seen calls for 75K on Bitcoin. Who knows how low ETH goes in that regard. I've also seen look, we're going to go straight to alltime highs. you know, we're going to maybe take a quick pause at 106 for Bitcoin, maybe around 4K for ETH, and then we're just going to teleport higher because of all the activity that's happening in the legacy financial markets. There's things Trump put more tariffs on the European

Union. He's trying to acquire Greenland. He may use military force. It's uh it's a mess out there, guys. But as long as you're not using leverage, you're probably safe in spot, cozy in stables perhaps. Always good to have some stables and dry powder in a choppy market and stay away from the leverage. In the meantime, we're going to be bringing you guys a great show today. So, don't go anywhere. Um, today we've got, let's see, who do we have on the docket? First and foremost, we've got Rand from Zama, who I'm particularly excited to talk to.

They've got a very unique mechanism that they're going to be deploying later today. Sure, they wish it was under some better market conditions. So, people felt like they had a little bit more dry powder to shove into this Zama pre-sale. I would uh certainly uh think it's still going to do well and people are going to have their eyes on it as am I. Uh we were going to have Kevin, but he was unable to join. So instead, we're going to have Johan uh from Chainlink, the chief business officer. They recently announced that they're bringing the US equities market, $80 trillion US equities market onchain. It's about 2% less these days, but they're bringing uh equities data onchain to power the next

form of tokenized equities. You guys have seen Lighter, you've seen Hyperlid, and I'm sure you've seen the New York Stock Exchange also announce that they're going to be not just going into tokenization, they're also going to be doing 247 markets. That's what we're going to start with today. Let's bring up our news. Uh what are some of the headlines here, Leo? Let's let's see what we got cooking and we'll run through a couple of things before we get Rand from Zam on the show. All right. So, first off, we've got a simplified crypto card infrastructure stack. Look, these guys at Armdes do

great work. One of the best data providers that's out there. We believe in this barbell approach, which we've heard from when we're discussing value acrruel in the past. If you guys missed Chuck's segment as we unpack the NEO finance market map did a fantastic job outlining the barbell approach as it pertains to NEO finance and in particular to stable coins from the very beginning of the industry and I'm sure this was true of previous industries to crypto as well. But when you're thinking about value acrruel usually the book ends the two barbell ends of the spectrum is where the value tends to acrue. On the one hand, you have bare metal getting as deep into the tech as possible. And then on the other side,

you have the consumerfacing and user product. The consumer is what you want to own if you're looking at launching an app. Obviously, that is a much more distributionoriented approach versus the very deep enterprise approach that you can derive from a bare metal business model. We talked about this pertaining to stable coins. The stable coin reserves are something where we think that there's still some room to grow. The issuers are here in the middle and they're certainly becoming commoditized. And then you've got the stable coins and the apps by which they're deploying these stable coins.

You've got CLA, you've got uh PayPal, you've got the state of Wyoming. These are municipalities and and companies with massive distribution through which they believe that they can spread their particular stable coin that is then powered by the middleware and the bare metal reserve managers. Still very early but we believe this barbell approach this value acral model is the right heruristic to think about it. Think about NEO finance in this way and you can position your chips accordingly. We also see when it comes to crypto cards, we have uh a similar barbell approach.

We've got processing on one end of the spectrum and on the other side you have the consumerf facing products, the funnel if you will. In the middle you've got the traditional stack, the issuing banks and the program managers. This is where we think that there's going to be some commoditization. And so the Visa, the Mastercards, the American Express, they're still continuing to do great business. On the other hand, you're going to get some new consumerf facing products and that is where we believe that there's a lot of room for growth. There's also going to be some long tales through these consumerf facing apps just like on the stable coin side, right? You know, you can think of Uber, Airbnb, Walmart, Amazon, all of these this plethora of apps that have meaningful

distribution. This is where we expect a lot more companies to launch stable coins. This is where there's a long tail. Whereas the issuer side of things is primarily a game that's already been won by Circle and Tether. I personally don't anticipate any new issuers to break into this game, but I do think that there's a lot of stable coin infrastructure products that are closer to the bare metal that are positioned very very well. Uh again, probably only a few that are able to win the bare metal game. When it comes to distribution, several uh products are able to get distribution and meaningfully scale consumer apps and I believe the same will be true of crypto

cards. Let's keep going through uh because we've got a lot more to get through before we bring up Rand, our first guest to the show. So, let's let's uh let's keep going. What have we got next? Man, Sailor was able to drive us to 125K once. What are we at now? Look, Sailor had to improve his execution. We're under 90. We're at 89 364. Bitcoin's just been sliding. Obviously, traditional markets sliding today as well. Um, we're going to see how this resolves because uh obviously there's there's still quite a bit of uh of powder left in Sailor's pockets.

They're going to have to raise more cash here pretty soon. But we know, you know, we saw some of the decisions uh over the last couple weeks that favored Micro Strategy. People are betting on Micro Strategy. Obviously, Sailor's betting on himself and they're buying up Bitcoin in the boatloads. Another $2 billion uh Sailor adds today. Our next headline, Leo, let's bring it up. Is very, very similar. Obviously, Michael Sailor's counterpart is Tom Lee. Tom Lee also decided to buy more. Let's see how much he decided to buy today.

These guys, you know, they're not buying on the way up anymore. They're buying on the way down. So, we know, let's cycle through here, Leo, because obviously these guys are going to have to step in um and and save us. It's rough. Where's the next, you know, the net new buyer, right? you know, we we saw um we saw Treasury Secretary Bessant say, "Look, you know, we seize some Bitcoin. We're not going to sell it." That's a great start, but in order for this, we need to have some new buyers. Um and you know, we we obviously saw New York Stock Exchange uh cycle. Um you know, that is going to be bringing a

lot more tokenized equities on chain. We're also going to be talking to Johan from Chainlink about the next tokenized equities. Um, and so, you know, there's a lot more of these asset classes that are currently offchain. They're siloed. They're going to be coming on chain and that brings a lot of capital efficiency. But when we have all of this, you know, right next to the crypto market, are we going to see, you know, more of these vehicles come on chain and then a lot of the the global democratized access, you know, these new capital uh people that were previously closed off to the US American equity market, now that they have access to tokenized equities, are they going to

be, you know, more into equities than they are crypto? I don't know. Then you have tokenized gold. You have tokenized metals. Um so next up, Tom Lee, obviously uh Sailor's counterpart here. Uh he bought uh another boatload 110 million uh when it comes to Tom Lee. Um so these guys are pouring in. Obviously Sailor has a lot more powder than Tom Lee does. $110 million in ETH is nothing to scoff at, but it's not moving the needle.

Obviously, there's a lot more selling. It seems as if this is, you know, this is a a sell-off that is spanning not just the crypto markets. There's obviously some exogenous factors that are at play here. Um, you've got Trump going after Greenland, you've got him putting tariffs on the EU, and you've got, um, you know, you've got this tariff ruling, which, you know, I speculated on a show a couple days ago if this, you know, whichever way this tariff ruling goes, it seems like it's going to benefit the money printer, right? Because on one hand, let's say, uh, the Supreme Court says, "Hey, you don't have to pay back tariffs. Tariffs are fine. You don't have to do anything that you're not already doing." Trump

just continues to do what he's doing, doesn't have to pay back any money. On the other hand, if they rule against Trump, which I think is priced right around 70% on the prediction markets, that they're going to rule against Trump, say that the tariffs are unconstitutional, in which case you would have to pay back a lot of money. They may have to turn on the money printer in order to pay that back. So, do they have that sitting there? Maybe. Are they gonna have to allocate it there? That would be what seems like a waste of money. If they have to print money, that is going to be great for the devasement trade, which ETH, Bitcoin, gold, all of this, uh, are hard assets that are are, you know, quite positioned, uh, well for the debasement trade. So, we're going to have to see

how this plays out. We don't know exactly what is leading to this, but we're going to we're going to hear from our guests in a moment. Um, and all right, let's keep things going. I think we've got a couple more headlines to cycle through here. Um, let's see. Let's see. Anchorage Digital could raise up to 400 million as IPO rumors swirl. This is where I want to talk about Neo Finance with you guys. Um, this is where I believe a lot of potential lies with Neo Finance.

Obviously, Anchorage Digital is one of the primary players in tokenization. They're helping a lot of legacy financial partners on board onto the chains look on onto Ethereum um and beyond. And so Anchorage Digital is an extremely crucial part of this tokenization infrastructure. And I think that their business is extremely positioned uh for this. Bloomberg reported that Anchorage is looking to raise between 200 and $400 million in order to go live with this IPO. Market onlookers have long noted that anchorage last valued at three billion is right for a public offering particularly as competitors like Bitco gear up for their IPO. I think these things rip. You know, I I we don't have tons of clarity into

the traditional equities market. But if things continue to progress how we think that they are, you know, we're going to continue to see quantitative easing. they're going to continue to pour liquidity into the markets and we're gonna see not just the the crypto tokens um you know do well as a result of the influx and liquidity and personally how do I know there's an influx of liquidity I like to read Arthur Hayes I think he's got his finger on the pulse a lot of times he's talking his own bias but look you know the guy's the guy's been around the block he knows where the macro sentiment is and I think when he says that there's you know liquidity that's adding to the system and they have you

know banking regulation that's getting deregulated there's a lot of factors here are anticipating that the liquidity influx peaks around March or April this is when we anticipate that this starts to roll over but until then if we continue to see progress in the debasement trade I anticipate that I IPOs tokenization and crypto IPOs do particularly well in the public markets just as you know we we see some bottoming out and appreciation uh in the token markets like we had seen over the last couple weeks in Bitcoin and ETH.

You know, we saw the rise from 3K to 3,300 in ETH. Obviously, Bitcoin got from low to mid 80s upwards of 95K. So, we had a significant bounce. Are we going to make new lows? I don't know. Right now, we're kind of hovering. Let's uh let's keep going. See what else is on the docket here. Maybe just another one or two things. will speedun through here. Ethereum is positioning themselves for the Neo Finance uh institutional bull run, which we believe is on the precipice of happening. Does it happen soon?

Potentially, we're going to have to see how it plays out. But let's scroll here because obviously we've seen a lot of things on this list continue to play out. So, Kraken launched X stocks. This is doing particularly well. Kraken obviously has their L2 as well. Ono, big into tokenization, has launched tokenized US stocks and ETFs. We're going to hear more from Yan from Chainlink about tokenization in the US equities markets as well. 247 access from the New York Stock Exchange is particularly relevant. Um, just incredible things here. China obviously is getting money market funds on this as well. Fidelity, one of the bigger financial institutions in legacy finance, is tokenizing their money

markets. Google announced their agent payments protocol, is enabling AI agents to autonomously execute payments using stable coins on Ethereum. Tune in to our show AI super cycle for more on the AI agent economy. And the list just goes on and on and on. So guys, there's obviously a lot happening behind the scenes. I think we have to think about the adoption curve on a long-term mindset and try to distinguish this from what we're seeing play out in the markets. Okay? And I know if you're levered up and you're playing per all you really care about, you probably care more about the geopolitical nature of things. You care about are tariffs constitutional or not? How will the US equities market react to some of these

things? And what is the Fed doing? These are all very important to the financial landscape as it plays out with regards to these asset prices. On the other hand, we've got the technology and the adoption from financial institutions and big big legacy financial players. And so, you know, we're we're going to continue to see this new type trader. My bet is New York Stock Exchange will use Canton. Look, we've seen DTCC use Canton. Um I would like to see uh these players use a public per permissionless blockchain like Ethereum. ultimately whether they use permissioned or their own private blockchains we will see composability take place and I think chain link uh Canton these guys are doing great job they're at the pinnacle

and the convergence point here that is Neo Finance we're going to get our first guest up so let's take a quick quick break and we will be right back don't guys don't go anywhere we'll be right back with a first guest Rand who has an ICO like opportunity we're going to learn a lot more about it right after Yet is built for big moments. The most fun you'll ever have with your crypto. Go to yeet.com to yeet into your next game.

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[music] Talk to AI like your lawyer or your doctor or your therapist. Yours, private and here today. Visit near.ai to have a fully private chat experience. [music] Havachi is fast and private per trading secured by ZK with Celestia [music] underneath. Go to habachi.xyz to start trading today.

Looking for yield that stands out? Infinifi gives you just that. Deposit stable coins and earn far more than the current savings rate. Infinifi is a battle tested, reliable defy platform that [music] is ready to go. Head to infinifi.xyz. XYZ [music] Hall is unified crypto payments. Give your users more wherever they are. Go to holiday.xyz to never write a smart contract again. >> Times over at Sama. Welcome to the show, man. Pleasure to have you.

>> Thank you, man. Thanks for having me. Super stoked to be here. >> Absolutely. Absolutely. So I think you know the the the right way to think about Zama is obviously a privacy first protocol. Um but you guys are practicing what you preach and I I I think a lot of people are very excited for this auction tomorrow. Um tell us, you know, first let let's talk a little bit. We don't want to bury the lead here, right? So, so Zama has an auction tomorrow uh where you guys are going to be opening uh up the essentially a community sale, but there's some some very nuanced mechanics about how this sale will work. So, I'll leave it to you please, you know, tell us what is special about, you know, this community sale versus like a a regular ICO or something like this.

>> So, maybe to give a bit of context of what Zama is. Zama is a confidentiality layer for public blockchains. It allows you to have confidential tokens, confidential DeFi, confidential applications on top of existing L1's and L2s like Ethereum and Solana. So we're not in L1 or L2, but rather we sit on top of L1's and L2s. So we've been in mainet on Ethereum since uh December and tomorrow we are launching our public auction where we're going to be selling 8% of the Zama token supply using Zama itself to hide the bids of people participating in the Zama auction. So it's kind of like you know we're using

Zama for the Zama auction to sell Zama tokens >> dog fooding. I love it man. I love it. I think you know what what the mechanism that this traditionally follows is sort of like a Dutch auction, right? Where you kind of start high and then the price falls as it naturally finds a floor. >> So no, >> okay, these Dutch auctions is how people did it in blockchain. But real Dutch auctions, they work differently. >> Okay. >> Uh they actually use what's called sealed bids. So when people place a bid, the price and quantity is actually private. So people don't know if you're buying one token or a million tokens.

>> And the bidding period, you go from the highest bid to the lowest bid. And the lowest bid where someone gets filled is a price that everybody above ends up paying. So like you know the the kind of like decrease in price and time auction this is just because before Zama nobody could run those sealed bid Dutch auctions on blockchains. So they had to find a way around that. But the real OG Dutch auction, the one that Google used for its IPO, the one that the Greeks were using, you know, to sell sheep 20,000 years ago, they're sealed bids and that's exactly what we did here.

>> Yeah. And so what is it? Let's dig in a bit around the Zama protocol because privacy has been extremely hot. You know, we've seen other privacy protocols. We've seen, you know, Zcash had a meteoric run. Monero just absolutely ripped >> and and now Zama you know has raised significant amounts of money has been in the works for a long long time launched mainet back in December. What is it about Zama's privacy protocol underneath the hood that enables these sealed bid type auction formats where you know some of the other privacy technology isn't able to do that.

>> We use something that's called fully homorphic encryption FHE. FH is a technology that allows you to compute on encrypted data without decrypting it. So for example, let's say you want to send money to someone on chain using USDT. Today, everybody would see how much you're sending, how much money you have, how much money the recipient has. With Zama, you can take your USD USDT on Ethereum. You can shield it into a confidential USD token and everything you do from that point is encrypted. your transfers, your swaps, when you're staking it, if you're earning yield in DeFi, all of that is basically shielded so nobody has any idea what's going on. Um, so FHE is the only technology that really enables that

because it gives you security. FHE is secure even against quantum computers, which by the way, you cannot say something like TE's for example that have been completely broken. It's also composable which means that you can use your FHE tokens and you can stake them in D5 for yield and do all other things that you would do with traditional tokens. You cannot do that with ZK. If you take for example Zcash, you can send Zcash confidentially to someone, but you cannot stake your Zcash. You cannot swap your Zcash. You're kind of stuck with just one use case, which is sending confidentially. FAT allows you to do whatever you want. And that's a really big breakthrough is it doesn't change how blockchains work. It just adds

confidentiality to existing blockchains. Got it. So this is a protocol obviously you know Zama went live and launched in mainet in December but this is a a privacy protocol that can augment existing blockchains >> such as Ethereum such as layer 2s. And so h how do you anticipate that you know once you know now that it's in mainet once the the token sale is live how do you anticipate that Zama will scale you know >> far and far and wide do you anticipate you know going after blockchains integrating with them what what is what is the go to market plan here over the next few to make sure that Zama proliferates deep within the market

>> we don't need to work with blockchains to deploy Zama on those chains There is nothing that a blockchain itself has to change or integrate. The what we need to do is we just need to deploy the Zama contracts on whatever chain we want to enable confidentiality on and people will be able to start shielding assets and you know building confidential applications. Um so we're planning we're working on Ethereum first that we launched in December. We're going to be launching other chains in the next few months, mostly VM first and then Salana later in 2026.

Initially, we're focusing, you know, on DeFi, DeFi, confidential payments. But if you think about something like the Zama auction, it's actually the start of maybe a bigger trend around confidential ICOs and confidential capital formation on chain because well there's a lot of things that are not that good when everything is public. >> Yeah. Yeah. And and this is something that we we continuously see. We're we're seeing more and more. Obviously 2017 era of ICOs, we saw quite a few, >> you know, there was Gary Gendler and the reign of terror that he brought on the industry. ICOs, you know, no longer were were a thing, but now they're back uh with programs like like Echo, like Legion. And so it makes sense that we're

going to we're we're we're going to continuously see some evolution in the ICO space. And we're going to see more and more of different flavors of these these sales, these token sales as they continue to develop and the technology becomes available. And so the way this auction works is first you shield your stable coins, right? And so this is how you're essentially sealing the amount of money that you're going to be spending on the Zama auction >> um behind the scenes shielding your deposits with your ERC20 stable coins into a wrapping contract issues you the equivalent amount of ERC 7984 tokens where balances and transfer amounts are encrypted. The shielding is visible on

chain but it's fully confidential. And then we have this window starts later today um and then goes for about 3 days where the bids start. >> Yeah. >> And so this will run and so prices are in increments of uh it looks like about half half of one cent. Um the auction floor is therefore 55 million FDV. So talk >> Yep. >> Yeah. So talk it talk us through some some of the the thinking behind this when you were coming up with this because this is obviously a novel mechanism and you've started to separate as far as how some of these other auctions are done.

>> What were some of the more important components that you took into account where you think maybe others may have missed? >> Zama has already raised a lot of capital. You know we we raised over $und00 million for Multicoin Pantera. So we have plenty of cash and plenty of runway. In fact, you know, we launched mainet before doing our public sale, which is not very common in blockchain. People usually do a public sale to fund the development of their protocol. We already built the protocol. We launched it and then we're selling tokens. So for us the auction and the reason why we went for this seal the Dutch auction mechanism is because we want to maximize distribution having as many people able

to hold Zama tokens so that they can use it in the protocol they can stake them uh as well as have true price discovery. If you believe in free markets then the only way to know the price of something is to let people decide what price they're willing to pay for that thing. You know that the price of anything is a price people willing to pay. as the only thing that really exists and Dutch auctions are a fantastic mechanism for price discovery. So I don't know how much we should be selling the Zama tokens. So we're just letting people decide how much >> they want to buy for.

>> Yeah. And and so yeah, this is this is free markets at their best, right? I mean, this is why we're here. This is what we like love to see. >> You believe or you don't believe in free markets, you know? >> We'll see what happens. I love and you know like like you said Rand a lot of people aren't willing to put their their name on the line put their protocol on the line like this. You guys are aren't only doing this with your token price which is arguably one of the most significant things that a protocol has right in in saying look the market's going to decide what the price of the token is. You're also doing it with your protocol. Like >> you have deep deep conviction in this.

>> What where did that come from? Look, I' I've been in crypto since 2013. So, this is my fourth cycle. You know, at that stage, uh I've seen a lot of things being tried. And one thing that has consistently been important is privacy. Clearly, you know, privacy is kind of the final boss of blockchain adoption. Initially, people wanted programmability. Ethereum solved that. Then, people wanted scalability. ZK rollup Sana solved that and now people need privacy because when you have programmability, privacy and scalability, you can basically rebuild everything that finance does and more on chain.

>> Yeah. >> Um so solving privacy was always something that we believe was extremely important not just for blockchain but in general. Uh and then how we launch that. Well, as I mentioned, you know, the price is whatever people decide a price is. And uh we uh you know, we we play by we play by the rules of that. >> Yeah. Okay. I I want to get to privacy as as a category at large. But first, let's round out the rest of the auction because we went through phase one, which is shielding stable coins. Phase two, placing your bids, you know, sealing the letter, placing your bid, and then phase three and four, right? clearing price and allocation. There's three possible outcomes. Your bid is above the clearing price, which you talked a little bit

about at the top of the show. Whereas, you would receive your full allocation and a refund for any overpayment. So, it's not like, oh, you overpriced this token, we're going to collect. No, you actually refund anyone who is over the clearing price. >> Your your bid is like the max price you're willing to pay. But if the last bid that was cleared is under your price, you still get your tokens plus a refund for the extra money that you paid. >> Yeah. Yep. And then if you bid at the clearing price, uh if quantity exceeds remaining supply at that exact price, you reuse a prorish share of tokens, refund the remainder. Last option here is uh or the last possible outcome is that you bid below the clearing price, in which case you would receive no tokens and you would get a full refund.

Um, and so obviously, you know, people want their tokens, but at the price they're willing to pay. And so this is this is, you know, a lot of game theory in which people are going to be thinking through how they're pricing the Zama token. >> Just to round out the rest of this auction mechanism is that, you know, when it's all said and done, um, and all the bids and and and things are counted, uh, we can claim our tokens on February 2nd. Once allocations are finalized, participants can claim both their ZALMA as well as their their any refunds like we talked about. Uh, and these will be distributed as standard ERC20 tokens.

Refunds can either be claimed as ERC20 or as the shielded uh, ERC7984 tokens. Anything else that people ought to know as they're thinking through the game theory behind the Zama uh, auction? Yeah, I mean I think there's something important to also uh take into the equation here is that staking the protocol is already live. Uh year one we are distributing 5% of the supply as staking rewards. So whenever you get your tokens in the auction, you can stake them immediately and you know since there isn't going to be a lot of circulating supply but there's going to be quite a big you know staking reward.

It's actually pretty interesting when you're thinking about what's the right price to take into account the staking rewards you're getting from participating in the auction staking those tokens. >> Uh so I think you know it's it's interesting because I've been looking at people play games pre-auction. I I think you know we're learning a lot about how people behave in this kind of of situations. And quite frankly, you know, I think that what we're doing here could turn into an actual product that other people could use. You know, other people could be reusing the same auction mechanism, uh, which is a great use case for Zama to protocol itself.

>> Yeah, it it certainly is. And this is, you know, one of the broader things about privacy here. You know, Zama is the right way to think about Zama is effectively a generalized shielding protocol, right? Like we saw >> Yeah. Yeah. That's a good way to see it. Like I I like to think about it as HTTPS for blockchain. >> Okay. >> Yeah. >> Got it. Um and so when it when it's all said and done, you know, what what would make this auction a success? You know, what what are you looking at any kind of milestones in terms of participation, adoption, >> distribution? You know, the more the more people participate. So we we have 25,000 people who you know registered.

Uh so you know I'm I'm expecting a good number of them to be participating. That's a lot. Keep in mind that six months ago Zama wasn't on the on the map in blockchain because we had not yet announced that we were working on a blockchain protocol. >> So so Zama and FHE because you know today the only FH technology that works is Zama's technology. um we went from non-existent to dominating the privacy narrative. So I think people really want FHE to work. They really want privacy on chain and they see that Zama is you know the most exciting leading project in this space.

>> So again I don't have any financial objective for the auction because we already have the capital to continue building for the next few years. So, you know, whatever people decide a price is, we'll be h yeah happy with that. >> Awesome. And, you know, just a word about the privacy category in general. Obviously, Zcash, Monero have been on on an incredible run. And, you know, the whole idea and concept of encrypted money has really been a mind virus. It's really, you know, it's really, you know, people have thought a lot about it as of recently. And so in you know the idea that we can encrypt and shield any ERC20 token I think is an extremely >> you know paradigm shifting you know way

in which we can accelerate a lot of the adoption and use cases that are available to us. Is there any any use cases or anything that is what what is most exciting to you know right now in the current landscape of privacy onchain? Well, I mean [sighs] there's so many things to be honest. I'll give you one example that I'm very excited about. It's [clears throat] an app that's called Rayash that is building on the Zama protocol. >> So Rayash is a neo bank that uses confidential stable coins to keep your money private but in a self-custodial way. So you know today when you're looking at banking you have basically

three choices. Mhm. >> You have traditional, you know, banks where it's completely centralized. They can freeze your assets. You don't own anything. Okay? And then you have the blockchain banks, the onchain banks. The problem with onchain banks is either they're using stable coins, but everything you're doing is public or they're using ZK and you're basically stuck with only payments. You don't have staking, you don't have swaps, you don't have anything else that you want from like a modern banking app. >> Confidential stable coins with FHE. So what rayash is actually using allows you not just to have confidential payments with your credit card. It also allows you to stake your confidential balance to earn yield. It allows you to swap your confidential uh stable coins for

other crypto. So if you take an app like Revolute, you can rebuild 100% of the features of that app on chain on in a self-custodial manner with full privacy and full composability with DeFi. Yeah, >> that is like I mean I I come from Lebanon originally. Okay, I don't know if you know that, but >> Lebanon a few years ago people got rugged by their central bank. >> They woke up one morning, the central bank said, "Oh, we're sorry. The money's gone. We're going to freeze all of your dollars in your bank account."

Boom. Gone. People's life savings gone. This cannot happen with an app like Ray Cash because you own your money and you have privacy. Yeah. Is uh is that part of your crypto story? The lore behind Zama is is you know seeing what happened in Lebanon and and the failure of the central bank caused you know kind of a a an uprise in in your crypto confidentiality you know encrypted money. Is that was that you know one of the things that helped to to accelerate your journey as a entrepreneur in the space? Yeah, I mean it's one one of it but I've actually been interested in FHE for over a decade. Uh I discovered this technology working on my previous company where I

was working on confidential AI. So back in you know 2015 to 2019 I was building this AI company which I sold eventually um and I discovered FHE I was like oh my god this thing is going to be the future of everything like everything is going to be encrypted AI blockchain. So a week after I sold my AI company, I started Zama with my co-founder Pascal Paet, who's one of the inventors of homorphic encryption. Um, so it's it's like it's one of those things where when you discover this tech and you understand the power and what it enables, it's very obvious that this is going to be used everywhere at some point.

>> Yeah. >> Because why not? Like why would you not shield your blockchain transactions? >> You know, why not? It's just a net benefit to everyone. [laughter] >> Yeah, it really is. Um and and you know, there's there's no no downside. Makes it a no-brainer. It makes it makes complete complete sense now. You know, you sold your your previous company, the next week you start another company. It makes sense why you were building all through the holidays and you know, you launched your blockchain. You you launched mainet, you know, a day before 2025 ended. Everyone, >> we said we would ship in 2025. We shipped in 2025. Certainly [laughter] did. Rand, thank you so much for joining today. It was an absolute pleasure. Best of luck. The the the auction tomorrow is

going to go go great. Um we're all rooting for you. So, thank you so much for joining. We'll see you next time. >> Thanks for having me. See you, guys. >> Absolutely. Cheers. All right, guys. That was Rand on confidential finance. Confidential stable coins is a core piece of what we believe is just where we're headed, which is neo finance. You've heard us talk a lot about neo finance. This is the evolution of DeFi. It's also the evolution of legacy finance and and encrypted money is part of this thesis where obviously you know the current legacy financial institutions have a lot of control over you know the bank deposits their lenders where the money goes where it flows in and out. you

know, they may not want to share all of those flows with competing banks, with their end users, you know, with, you know, regulators. There needs to be checks and balances, but in order for, you know, the deep deep um uh privacy and confidentiality to continue to run, we we need protocols like Zama. Otherwise, you know, we're just plagued by the existing public nature of a lot of these transactions. Um, so I'm particularly excited to see Zama's auction go live tomorrow. I'll be participating. I think uh it's going to go off without a hitch and I I love to see when protocols dog food their own technology. The easy way out is, you know, you third party, you get a vendor

for everything and you're kind of just like this coordination engine in the middle. but actually building hard technology and then not just building it but using it yourself in flight where millions of dollars are at stake. I'm excited. If this goes off without a hitch, Zama is positioned for a tremendous year. So, I'm I'm excited to see how it plays out. We're going to get our next guest up in just a moment. Guys, don't go anywhere. Johan from Chainlink is going to be here in just a minute talking about how Chainlink is bringing the entire US equities market 245 on chain with chain link price feeds. Don't go anywhere. We'll be right back.

[music] Yeet is built for big moments. The most fun you'll ever have with your crypto. Go to yeet.com to yeet into your next game. >> [music] >> Not your keys, not your coins. From the team that pioneered cold storage, Treasure has just released its new wallet. Guys, if you are still using hot wallets in 2025, 2026, you are [music] missing the entire point. Secure your coins. Get a Treasure at treasure.io.

>> [music] >> Go anywhere onchain instantly with relay.link. Relay is closing in on 10 billion transferred. Go to relay.link to bridge your assets now. Money shouldn't wait for Mondays. Following his real upgrade, Polygon is now one of the fastest [music] chains for stable coin transfers and payments. Visit Polygon Technology to learn more. [music] KSHI is the world's largest [music] prediction market. You can trade on anything in all 50 states. Go to

kshi.com to trade today. Talk to AI like your lawyer or your doctor or your therapist. yours private and here today. Visit near.ai to have a fully private chat experience. Welcome back guys. I am here with Johan Yeed from Chainlink, the chief business officer. Today, Chainlink announced they're bringing the US equities market onchain. 80 trillion dollars of US equities in the market and they're bringing onchain uh equities data 245.

This comes amidst a lot more tokenized equities conversation in the market. Johan, it's a pleasure to have you. I I'm excited to talk because Chainlink has a lot of a lot of very cool things going on as we indul in endeavor on this what we're calling Neo finance which is this convergence between legacy finance and the legacy crypto infrastructure. We believe there is a new uh new echelon coming and chain link is at the center of this. Uh so it's a pleasure it's a pleasure to chat. Thanks for being here. >> Yeah, thank you so much for having me on.

>> Absolutely. Well, tell us a little bit about how this came to fruition. I think, you know, we see on Hyperlquid, on Lighter, on you know, a lot of what the New York Stock Exchange is talking about bringing these tokenized equities onchain. You're the chief business officer at Chainlink. What was the business case to bring this data source onchain? Ultimately, what does this help enable and unlock in the onchain markets? I think it actually it can be summarized by the evolution of stratfi [snorts] and the evolution of GI. Where is GI heading? GIF is going towards supporting more and more assets, more and more commodities. Basically going from being a place where you could only trade

tokens like cryptonative tokens to being able to trade equities, commodities, etc. At the same time, where is Stratfi going? Well, Trafi is going in a very interesting place where we've had for the longest time local markets. The US stock market was aimed at US investors, right? The Singapore stock market at Singapore investors. This is no longer the case. Every stock market around the world is becoming more and more globalized. That means your investor base is actually for people outside the US more and more. If you actually look at the amount of people who own the US stock market um in

percentage terms, it used to be 8% were outside the US around 20 years ago. Now it's 18%. So this amount has been growing. Now what does this mean for us? This means you actually want equities to be trading 247 because more and more stock markets are meant for a global audience, not for a local audience. So this launch is to us the logical evolution for both TRFI and for both GFI. That's why it just made sense to launch it. And you know when you talk out of macro terms which I just did into actual practical real world adoption, we already had eight users start using

these equities stocks uh equity feeds. One of them is lighter which is the second biggest per deck in the space. Another one is BitMX which is the first uh kind of perpetual exchanges for crypto in the space. So you're seeing already wild adoption which I think is kind of confirming that we're working on really the next phase of adoption for both DeFi and also trifi. >> Yeah, very well said and and this is a convergence that we anticipate will continue to develop and I think you laid it out perfectly well. Also, one thing as to why this hasn't been done before, the technology simply wasn't available, right? There were not high throughput blockchains. Ethereum wasn't at scale.

We didn't have ZK technology. All of this powers perpetual exchanges like lighter that allows them to scale. And once you have the ability to scale, then it becomes a matter of porting in that that data so that well, you have something to trade, right? And so now we're seeing uh the the continuation of new asset classes become onchain tradable and and I think US equities is one of the largest markets and asset classes in the world. It just makes sense for this asset class to be brought on chain. Now, Johan, I want to get your take on something because we also saw the New York Stock Exchange come out and announce that they're going to be developing a tokenized equities platform and they're going to be rolling this out

and enabling some 247 trading. What's your reaction to this? And I'm curious because a lot of people on, you know, the crypto Twitter have said, hey, how does this help crypto? If it's if it's equities, that's not crypto tokens. And if they're building some, you know, permissioned private blockchain that's not helping all the L1 tokens and L2s that, you know, we we've come to know and understand over the past few months and years. How does this does it help crypto? And if so, how? >> Okay, I think it's two parts. First of New York Stock Exchange launching this kind of confirms what I was saying earlier. This is the next evolution for Trefy. The next evolution for TRFI is this market 245 fully composable like we

have in D5. Fully composable means you don't have a hold in the trading at a certain time which then creates all the issues you know uh with liquidity volatility etc. Now regarding why is it good for crypto crypto and this used to be the messaging since 2017 actually it's been a long time around you know even before it's about how do we tokenize the whole world right that's our main moto about taking a silo infrastructure which you have in every country and the stock market is one example of this silos infrastructure and making it more global making it more accessible making it more composable.

Being able to have one protocol which has US equities, Hong Kong equities, South American equities in one single place. That's the main goal of crypto. Now folks can have different versions of what goods for crypto right what's good for my asset I invested what's good for you know the vision I have to me the vision that many people have joined the space for was a vision which is around how do you make the whole world more composable how do you make every asset more composible how do you break down silos because when you break down silos you make everything more efficient >> when you make everything more efficient you create new opportunities for people to open businesses, to make money, to

get, you know, things they couldn't do before because everything was so siloed and, you know, opac. >> Yeah, absolutely. And I think you guys are doing this and you're bringing US equities, like you said, you're bringing US equities closer to other equities markets, which I think is maybe something that people don't initially think of. They think, "Oh, we're bringing US equities. We're bringing this onchain. It'll be next to the rest of my crypto tokens." But mo most of this is becoming composable with, you know, equities markets in the US, Hong Kong, China, Japan, all of this. It it it's all able to coexist together. And I think that is something that people don't recognize right off the bat. This

makes the entire financial system more efficient. Also a a question a little bit deeper into the technology here. You guys are are not just providing the the the middle price, right? Which would be sort of a like an uh somewhat uh unprecise way of measuring how these things are trading. You chose and let me just make sure that I have this right here. you guys chose to launch this particular oracle with market status, bid ask price, bid ask volume, state staleness indicators, la last traded price. How does this help the robust nature of these markets and and help again close some of the information gaps and greater capital

efficiency so that we help unlock a lot of the value you were speaking of before? Yeah, I think the way to look at it is for the longest time crypto was in many ways inefficient and this allowed a lot of financial arbitrage to happen. As we get more and more sophisticated players, these sophisticated players actually need more data points on chain >> to be able to create the most efficient market we can create. Right? So, a lot of these data points you're providing are data points market makers, hedge funds, etc. do require in order to create an efficient market on chain.

Those are things they've come to be used to in Trafi that we're bringing to GI. You know, really the way to look at it is we're taking things from TRFI into our space to make our space better. But our space is also making TRDFI better, right? When you talk about composibility, what are we doing? We're making Tratfi as composible as Defi. That's a huge deal, right? So, it's really this shared kind of exchange between what TratFi brings to us, what we bring to TRFI, and then being able to create the ultimate experience for people around these two exchanges.

>> I I think that's a fantastic point. A lot of times we think, oh, we want to bring Tradfi onchain, right? We want to bring these equities. We want to bring these asset classes. We don't think about crypto's main export. The export is the blockchain which can then go into the trady ecosystem, the legacy financial ecosystem and improve the way they're doing things over there. And I think chain link has been one of the best at doing this from both ends of the spectrum. Essentially having a very very clear vision of where the space is headed and and squeezing both the crypto side from over here and the legacy finance over here and saying we know where this industry is headed. We are going to help everyone get there and do it from both sides. And and link is at

the the center of this. Chain link is at the center of this. And so as as you know we we sort of think about this vision that chain link has helped to illustrate. What does this mean for chain link? Because obviously you guys have been powering the DeFi ecosystem for so long. Your oracle price feeds are are embedded into AB and and you know all of the major DeFi applications. Now you're starting to go deeper into the legacy financial world. What does this mean for chain link as the vision continues to evolve?

>> The the simple way to look at it is we're a bridge for both worlds. And the way we've evolved over time was always to look at holistically what's coming next for this space for GFI it all start to do is okay how do we build G5? We need data for G5 right without data G5 cannot exist. So we started in 2018 providing data feeds which now power like 80% of DI basically with Stratfi it's actually been the same way. We've looked at okay what does Stratfi need? Well they're going to get into tokenization because tokenization is a logical step for them. It's more efficient. It's more transparent. It improves a ton of stuff for them. Right?

So what do they need? They need compliance. We launched ACE. They need crosschain. We launched CCIP. They need DAV data. they need to be able to do transfer agency. We launched a digital transfer agent with UBS. So you see for us it's um I think we are probably one of the most pragmatic companies in the space because we don't really have we we have a very clear mission which is how do I bridge these two words? How do I make these two words interact and we don't really deviate from this in any aspect. All we do is basically how can these two words connect together and what's coming next for DeFi, what's coming next for trfy and this basically

informs our road map. >> Yeah. >> And Yeah. >> Yeah. Yeah. And and ultimately I think this is only one world. You guys create, you know, you create this and and if their two worlds are so interconnected, if they're so connected, they're only one world. And I think that is the vision that we're building towards and you guys have helped to create uh a very interconnected world of finance. So >> yeah. Yeah, please. >> So the way to look at it is I think for the longest time TRFI was a closed system and DI was a closed system meaning the two didn't interact. Our goal has been to bridge down the silos more and more between the two through data through compliance through crosschain and you know every product we

launch is basically a product around connecting these two words and getting them from closed systems which they were only a few years ago only three four years ago the interactions between GFI and trafi were nothing except you know news article oh is bad or G5 is bad right that was basically the only interaction now we're in a complete different world where these two words are interacting on a day-to-day basis through tokenization through the product we launched today. You know, these are examples of how we bridge these two ecosystems. >> Yeah, absolutely. And it's something that is going to continue. Um Johan, the last thing for me is uh you know, chief business officer at Chainlink. Are are you headed to Davos

uh this week? Do you is anyone from chain link headed to the uh the world economic uh you know forum hanging out with with some of the leaders there? Uh what what's the plan? >> We have uh we have some folks in Davos. Yes. >> Yeah. What what is the messaging like? How is ch you know you're you know there's big there's big players out there. What is what is uh chain link uh you know what is the message that they're going to be spreading to to some of these guys? >> Everyone is talking around tokenization. We make it clear to all of these guys and many of them know us already. That's a great thing. Tokenization requires chain link. Tokenization is about connecting things.

>> Who is connecting things? Chen link. All right. Like who who has been connecting the space to trade for the last seven years? We have. So basically in all of the tokenization convos we're having chain link is a recurring topic. >> Yep. Totally spreading the good word. Johan, thank you so much for joining. uh chain link is bringing these two worlds together. It makes a ton of sense. You're out there preaching tokenization. Um man, I I love it and I think uh I think we're going to see a lot more of this to come. Johan, thanks so much for joining us.

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man. Johan's the man. I I just, you know, I I said it during uh during the the chat with Johan. I I continuously think that, you know, we're going to have like this convergence of the two worlds. Um you know, we're we're seeing a lot of the companies that are now kind of straddling the line between legacy finance, off-chain systems, and onchain systems. you know, we're we're going to hear from Omar from ZK Sync coming up and you know, they're doing a lot in the RWA space as well. And so RWAs in general, right, represent equities. It's not just equities. It's it's any asset that is natively issued offchain, right?

And I think that's something that's important to understand is really you've got what you've got here at the end of the day is you've got assets and bridges, right? And so you know these can exist on chains but at the end of the day we know that you know whether it's a rollup or another rollup these are kind of just Ethereum and even at the end of the you know it's all L1s most of these are going to have some sort of validator set you know it's going to be somewhat distributed and we can interoperate amongst these chains relatively well like we spent months diving deep into the interoperability space into the modular space understanding the nuts and bolts of blockchain architecture so that we could understand where there is gaps and where the market still has room to grow. And I

think what we're seeing now is the technology is ready. It is essentially stable to support an influx of new assets. And that's what we're seeing play out. We're seeing a new asset class, if you want to call it RWAS. You know, people love and they hate that term. I want to think about RWAs and you know what's coming onchain now as assets that are not natively issued onchain obviously ETH bitcoin these are things that are really not you know you can't take them offchain you can take them from blockchain to another you can

write them down you can put them in terms of a seed phrase you can put them uh you know into a document or a company or a contract, but fundamentally these assets were issued on chain. They belong onchain. What we're seeing a lot of now is seeing natively off-chain assets be brought on chain. And I think tokenization platforms and a lot of the companies that are going out into the neoinance space and bringing these things onchain is where we're going to see an explosion. We're seeing it in tokenized equities and we're seeing it on tokenized gold metals. you know, this is going to create a lot more composability amongst the financial system at large, both the off-chain

assets as well as the native natively issued tokens and and crypton native assets as well. And so ZKYNC has been doing an incredible job in this space. They're going out and they're helping legacy financial institutions with billions of dollars in money market funds in all sorts of different asset classes and products. they're bringing these things onchain for the benefit of not just the institutions but also the end users. And so we're gonna have Omar come up and uh and we're going to talk about everything that is happening with RWAS at ZK Sync and how this trend is progressing. Uh so without further ado, let's uh let's get Omar up on the show.

There he is. Omar, welcome. Welcome back. >> Hey Robbie, how you doing man? >> Good. Good. It's good to have you, man. Yeah. Glad to be here again. It's been like three months since we last uh chatted. >> Yeah. Yeah. Since then, uh you guys have been busy, huh? >> Yes, we've been pretty busy. Um Q4 was pretty pivotal for us. Um we had already I mean we launched Atlas Airbender um which is now number one on eats.org if you want to take a look in terms of just both cost efficiency and speed. And uh and it really was a big pivotal moment also from the business side of really focusing in on enabling institutions, enterprises to start

building on Ethereum in their own terms, you know, with the full privacy and that's what we call providiums. >> Very cool. And so, you know, we've had a wide array of people on this show. Like last week, we had um Mike Kagny, you know, the the founder of uh Figure Helock, which is doing incredible things, but you know, they've got 20 billion in in, you know, these home equity loans. You know, they're doing it on Providence blockchain, which is a little bit questionable. It's a little closed off. It's not quite, you know, the public permissionless infinite garden that we that we uh you know, we like over at Ethereum. And then, you know, you've got a lot of these announcements coming out. New York Stock Exchange, you know, DTCC, they're going, they're using Canton. It's again like

kind of this like opaque blockchain thing. You guys are sticking to your guns and and continuing to double down on Ethereum. Talk to us a little bit about providiums and why it's so important that these things are on Ethereum. Yeah. So, one is there's historically when we were we've been talking to banks and institutions for like a little over three years now since when I first came on because we realized blockchain was a big step function up for the entire financial ecosystem in terms of mostly from like how these systems actually work and communicate with each other, how they become interoperable uh etc.

And one of the key things that we also realized that you do need a settlement layer that is fully decentralized and fully neutral and that is you know can't be turned off. it doesn't ethereum 10 years plus has never stopped >> right >> and so that is extremely pivotal for getting the base layer for which you can build everything else on top of u and that's why you know zay sync started building out um and that's why we built out providions as well in terms of taking the zk stack adding in a number of different layers that enterprise and institutions are going to want everything from permissioning role-based access control full privacy complete control and ownership over the system extremely high performance

um and interoperability. A lot of institutions also want to build on top of Ethereum and you see all these announcements of so and so launching like like uh their tokenized assets onchain different governments now like like you know UAE with ADI chain also building for the for the uh digital Durham stable coin. Um and so it's a very symbiotic I think relationship where you have one of the largest onchain capital markets which is Ethereum and you've got Pervidium which is kind of like your private space where you fully control everything uh but you can still interact with everything on Ethereum. You can interact with you know all the DeFi applications like a morpho etc. uh directly from your layer 2 u and this is thanks to you know air bender

and the significantly fast zk proofs that we can now do. So settlement on Ethereum, the window for bridging back and forth between L2 and L1 has pretty much diminished down to minutes and eventually you know we'll get it down to under a minute uh and just be seconds. So it almost creates not I think not not necessarily the way to think about it is oh it's a layer 2 it's a chain it's a giant ecosystem it's a massive undertaking. These can be very small systems or app chains and you have complete control, complete privacy, but you're still interacting interoperable with the infinite garden as uh you know we all >> is that is that where you think this is going because a lot of this is currently on L L1's and and it is permissioned but they can get all of that and they can

still remain composable by doing this in an app chain format and I think that is something that we're going to continue to see a lot more of you know because right now I think a lot of people are like hey this is great. You know, the New York Stock Exchange is going to go 247. They're going to tokenize equities, but how does that benefit crypto, right? And this is kind of like what's happening on, you know, crypto Twitter right now is, you know, this is great. They're taking these assets that aren't crypto tokens. They're not really, you know, like my bags. They're like this other thing and they're putting them on a blockchain. It sounds like it should be good. It should be bullish, but it still feels like people aren't really able to connect the dots. Do you think like the New York Stock Exchange going

247 and and going deeper into tokenization, do you think that has direct benefits to crypto or is it sort of like indirect? Maybe it's it's a Trojan horse to get them thinking about it and then, you know, they'll use it as a stepping stone to ultimately, you know, become more composable or go into this this deeper then it will become more evident or do you think there is there's tangible direct benefit from them tokenizing going 247? >> I think it's it's a huge stepping stone um for the entire industry. Everyone should be extremely um proud that we finally got to this point where you have major institutions like NYC and ICE um moving onchain doing 247 trading. You

have to understand like these institutions have been building they they always understood the promise and the benefits of moving to blockchain. It was just a matter of time. And this is what I think everyone in the industry has been wanting to get, which is, hey, we want the rest of the world to take blockchain seriously as a complete new paradigm shift in how assets are treated, the they move, being composable, all of those benefits. And so to me, this is a huge validation of everything that everyone in the crypto industry has been building towards. I I I can I can see how you know maybe you know those in the trenches are a bit

dismayed because you know markets might potentially be down like etc. But at the end of the day the use cases and the actual um uh benefits of the blockchain the rest of the world is starting to really open up and see them and start to get into this adoption. uh the rest of the world's I mean the troll of addressable market for now is you know we just took a 10x in addressable market for what crypto and can do >> that's how I would this this opens up an entirely new venue for us where you know last year was a pretty big boom year for let's say stable coins for money market funds but now you got the entire equities market moving on chain rapidly u pretty soon that's going to lead to a

lot of the other markets that are even bigger than equities you know like real estate will eventually start to move on chain. You'll start having private credit >> uh commodities. And so this makes crypto and blockchain be taken very seriously by a lot of the biggest names in the world. >> Yeah. >> Including governments. Now governments are now going to start taking crypto and blockchain very seriously and and you'll see more and more um either stable coins um and and deposit tokens or tokenized deposits also come on chain. Very >> rapid.

>> Yeah. It it you know what this feels like a it feels really similar to when we had arguments within Ethereum about you know if L2 like rollups are competing with ETH or one another but we kind of realized you know like that's a silly question to ask when a lot of this is becoming tokenized and it's coming on chain I think again people are thinking how does this really benefit like my closed loop thing where I'm at right now they're not really seeing the bigger picture which is if you bring a new asset class in one that's significantly greater volume that is going through the chain in theory that's generating fees for the chain and the L1 token whether

it is ETH or rollup token should do better again that that that's kind of like a direct tangible benefit the other one is if you position you know you know there's like 80 trillion dollars of value in the US stock market right if you put that right next to all of the crypto tokens that are onchain, you would think that there's this wealth effect where it becomes a lot more composable and you see a lot more flows back and forth and obviously, you know, the stock market being bigger than, you know, the the crypto market by, you know, multiple orders of magnitude, you would expect some of that to spill over and to sort of drag crypto up with it.

So, you know, I think I I think the current uh dialogue on chain is a little bit shortsighted and uh and you know, it's really it's really a matter of thinking a little bit bigger as far as how this is going to benefit, you know, the the forcoming of a lot of these chains and a lot of these projects that are that are positioned for incredible upside such as ZK Sync. you guys have been in this in this neo finance space and I I say neo finance as sort of this evolution of both legacy finance and crypto infrastructure kind of this convergence point between the two. You guys have been building this you know have been building with RWAS in mind for a long time and uh and Alex you know founder of ZK Sync uh put out this this

road map uh for 2026. Providiums are at the top of the list. Could you just walk us through the road map a little bit? We've got Providiums, we've got ZK Stack, we've got Airbender. How does this tie in, you know, together so that we ultimately get, you know, this flourishing onchain economy with all of this new value that, you know, that we're talking about? >> Yeah. So I would say 2025 I December 2024 we put up we put out one of our first roadmap uh post which essentially listed out all the things that we're going to work on and try and hit from a pure just technology infrastructure standpoint that was full EVM EVM equivalency EVM compatibility

um significant improvement in performance now we can hit 15,000 even 30,000 TPS per chain um and significant reduction in costs I Now, I just ran some of the numbers, but you can pretty much run a high performance machine. Um, if you're literally anyone um with very low cost, I mean, we're talking about less than a tenth of a penny for transaction, including everything, including the provers and settlement. And so, that was kind of you had we had to lay down that building block before we could actually go to market with a very focused product, which is Pvidium.

We needed to be able to make sure anyone can build everything that they've already been building in EVM. They had all the performance needs that they could even imagine or needed in their own environment and uh they had all the privacy and compliance and control and ownership that was also needed for most of these institutions. Um so that's kind of where 2025 ended and now the new phase for us focusing on the building is the infrastructure is there the technology is now there to go and capture the market and now it's about building very use case or segment specific products that go and capture different segments

of market. For example, Etheidium's really targeting fintech, neo banks, banks, and governments who want to build on top of Ethereum, who want to build in their own uh fully controlled environment with privacy. >> Yeah. Yeah. I mean, Omar, you're you're, you know, preaching to the choir here. We put out this market map uh last Friday and it showed, you know, where we think a lot of the adoption is going to come from in 2026 and beyond. You know, the two major categories there were stable coins and tokenization, including the issuers, the stable coin builders, the apps, as well as, you know, the the tokenization platforms, the product issuers, and then you've got, you know, this layer of fintexs, neo banks. We believe a lot of the wallets are going

to end up going in this direction. We believe a lot of the legacy financial institutions are going to have to innovate especially if we get you know the the Clarity Act that forces some of these banks to pay some higher interest because you you know we know the stable coins are and so if that happens you know we expect a lot of these legacy banks to look more like NEO banks. Give us your two cents on what we're calling the NEO finance thesis. Do you like it? How did you guys arrive at this conclusion? and and what's the right way to position within this category going forward?

>> Yeah, so neo finance is interesting term. Um I think historically if you look at fintexs in general which you know were maybe the previous iteration of this most of them are just UX rappers on existing rails. Neo finance to me is taking all that same what we've learned from building really good customer user experience and uh and essentially rewiring the entire rails it's been built on and blockchain and decentralized blockchains open permissionless blockchains give you that brand new rail to build neo finance and this is where you know like NYC moving 247 trading is fantastic because you can start taking uh some of these assets

that are have always been on web 2, had always been on archaic rails and now start making them composable with all the things that we like about in DeFi um but with 24/7 rails that don't ever shut down. >> Incredible. Yeah, man. This is uh this is something we we anticipate a lot a lot more of to come uh in 2026 you know because we've got this happening on the fintech side we've got this happening on the legacy side and also on the crypto infrastructure side such as ZK sync you know it's no longer like we're solving the interrupt we're solving comp problem solved you know like you guys did great like check you know did that now it's about bringing this and bringing this composable into you know the bigger pie

of you know this this greater financial world that that's out there because finally the tech is ready. The builders did it. Now it's time to you know innovate in the more financial sense uh and and unite these two worlds. And so you guys have something called the bank stack. I think this is an outgrowth of a lot of the work that you've done on the providiums on the privacy side the interop side. This is something that you know you like you said you went you spoke to the banks and you you talked to them you understood their their problems and their pain points and this was the solution to that. Give us a sense of you know how those conversations with banks went. What what were their pain points and why is the bank stack you know the the right solution for them? Yeah, the

biggest pain point historically has always just been uh privacy and compliance like how do I build on blockchain without you know essentially giving everyone my data without people seeing my transactions it should be on a need to- know basis um then you know okay so that problem got solved historically by the enterprise blockchains like the hyperledgers etc but they were completely isolated and then you started hearing okay interoperability we know privacy and compliance we can build in the existing enterprise blockchains of the previous cycle, but now interoperability is a big issue because everyone's just building walled gardens that are completely isolated. Um, they tried solving that by maybe thinking of consortium chains, but

that doesn't necessarily work. And so, uh, a lot of them have gotten accustomed to, okay, it's time to just go and join the open, uh, decentralized world. uh but they but if you do that you still need the privacy and compliance and ownership capabilities and that's where pvidiums that's where the idea for priv uh and the bank stack is really just a buildup of per if pvidiums are the computer that enables you to build on chain build on top of Ethereum on your own terms the bank stack is really just going to be all the different features and applications integrations that we'll build into it so it's more of a turnkey solution so everything from uh you know price data feeds. I think you just had

uh Johan from Chainlink on, you know, having like chain link price data feeds on there. So, you have that having access to Ethereum DeFi and liquidity right away, having access to all your MPC wallets, all of that infrastructure, but then having key applications, you know, for example, you're going to need things that allow you to accept and send any stable coin or tokenized deposit. >> Yeah. So the bank stack is really about making sure all that plumbing uh works from day one and we have that built in to every single part of our stack and I think one of the terms you'll probably start seeing more and more is also tokenized deposits um which could be one of the fastest growing sector in my opinion for 2026 as more as you know

banks are going to aggressively start moving on chain they're going to tokenize their existing deposit base and start making those be composable with the onchain world, but you know, obviously there it's it's different from stable coins. Um, and so we're going to be working on making them be fully composable across the, you know, the blockchain world and Ethereum. >> Awesome. Yeah, I mean you guys already did great work with the ZK stack, you know, helping a lot of the composability and interop across L2s, you know, you you spun up a lot of the app chains, dug deep into that and now going into the banking world, you know, bringing a lot of that expertise into the bank stack, right? And so help put these pieces

together. How does you know the bank stack like you're saying tokenized deposits, compliance, all of these things out of the box and then on the other side ZK stack helps unite a lot of the rollup ecosystem. How do the two stacks work together? How does ZK stack and bank stack how do these fit together to ultimately bring you know this entire ZK sync experience? >> Yeah, so ZK stack is the underlying blockchain protocol. So it's think of it as the rails um and the underlying technology infrastructure needed. The bank stack is really just taking providiums and adding in a lot of the features that banks really require everything from having web hooks and connectivity to core banking ledger

systems so you can have onetoone reserves for tokenized deposits. Uh having all the right MPC wallet providers on there so you can bring your existing wallet infrastructure on chain. having access directly to Ethereum key DeFi applications so you know you don't have to build those integrations yourself and maybe even having some of the key asset issuers also be available. So those that want to do let's say cash sweeps with tokenized money market funds and their stable coin tokenized deposit holdings having all those key features um that's really where the bank stack starts to come in. It's really just layers of capabilities, applications that are use case specific uh that enables you to take you know um any chain built using Zika stack and using

pvidium uh and just start building your application that you need and start going to market way faster. Um the key here is to take historically you know building L2s for enterprises or even building chains has been a massive undertaking. It takes a year or two to go from ideiation, decision- making, strategy, you know, test net development. What we want to do is take from ideation, strategy buy in at the seuite level to maybe months, even just weeks in terms of having something ready in production. And that's what we want to get to.

>> Yeah. And now there's a lot more examples out there in the wild that you can point to and say, "Hey, here's a success story, right? You guys want to do what they did? you get buy in at the seauite level level it's out of the box like you said you know maybe you know you know days to weeks uh not months in in terms of engineering overhead uh to deploy and so you know as we wrap up here Omar you know you said tokenized deposits kind of flying under the radar if you had to pick like one you know sort of underrated trend that you think is going to be particularly big but you know maybe it's not getting the attention it deserves right now is it tokenized deposits or is there something else that you're partic particularly excited about uh headed into 26. Yeah, I

would say so you don't hear a lot of this on let's say crypto Twitter for example, but I would definitely say tokenized deposits uh could easily become the fastest growing onchain asset class um by AUM. I I imagine just on Zika alone and Ethereum you'll probably have anywhere from 20 to$50 billion worth by end of this year and this is essentially being brought on by you know the Genius Act and you know hopefully soon the Clarity Act as well. Um because historically banks always thought that they could just wait. They always knew they were going to move on chain but they thought they had enough time. Now it's pretty much a land grab. Everyone is moving extremely fast. Um and you can see that because I mean every week now

there's a new story about some big institution doing something on chain. Tokenized deposits is really uh for banks it's it's digitizing their actual deposits and making them be usable in the onchain world. So, it's a two-sided coin between that and stable coins, >> right? And that was that was my question is how are how are tokenized deposits different from stable coins? >> Uh, I think for the most part, you kind of just need to go into the genius act. For one, tokenized deposits can be FDIC insured. >> That's really big. Uh, they can also offer yield.

>> Um, but more importantly, uh, banks have deposits. That's, you know, their core asset. And token as deposit allows them to actually take their deposits, move them on chain and make them be composable in 247. >> Got it. >> Without that can't they they you know they have they have to use stable coins. It's not necessarily one to one. It's you know stable coins are reserved differently. Um and so think of this as just like a stepping stone and a core function or a core asset that banks and institution are going to need. >> Got it.

>> To be able to do everything that they want to do on chain. >> Got it. Got it. So once a stable coin enters the purview of a bank and it becomes in bank's custody a deposit then it becomes tokenized becomes a tokenized deposit not a stable coin. >> Yeah it's it's actually the other way around. So like deposits they already have >> they can just convert them >> and move them on chain and actually start taking advantage of you know their existing fractional reserve banking system you know move them off for lending think for like uh loan receivables or card receivables etc. Um but yeah, it it it it's a step function up change for them in terms of their existing core banking infrastructure.

>> Yeah, makes sense. Omar, thank you so much, man. Absolute pleasure always to have you on the show and uh best of luck. Uh 2026 is going to be a good one. Let's uh let's crush it. >> Let's do it. Thank you for having me. >> See you again soon. Thanks, Omar. >> Thanks. Bye. >> Bye. All right, guys. Tokenized deposits. Haven't heard a lot about it, but you know, makes sense. You know, stable coins obviously have to be one to one backed. They're not FDIC insured. If you have a bunch of cash and deposits sitting in a bank vault, you know, basically sitting in a bank's database, then they get tokenized. You know, it could be a stable coin that someone deposits into a bank or it could be cash someone deposits into a bank. Once the

bank takes custody of that and decides to tokenize it, there's a lot more exciting things that they can do with it that are not possible elsewhere because you know, Genius requires stable coins be onetoone reserved. Look, our banking system is not one to one reserved. We have fractional reserve banking and that's how credit is created. And so taking deposits and tokenizing them brings them into the purview of what is normally done in the banking system allows credit to be created but again keeps it in a tokenized form. And I I think Omar is right. I think you know this is uh a sector that uh we can anticipate a lot more growth in 2026 and beyond. Guys, thanks for another great

show. We're going to see you again tomorrow, same time, and we're gonna have another great show for you tomorrow. So, uh, stay safe out there. Don't get liquidated. And, uh, you know, survive to trade another day. We'll see you guys again tomorrow. Signing off. Peace. [music]